Creating a 3D Cinderella Practice Cake

June 29, 2010 | 23 Comments | 10,006 views

Whenever I’m attempting a new cake or decorating technique, I MUST practice beforehand. You see, Kaydee is turning the big 3 on July 1st and has been begging for a Cinderella Princess Party for months now. She’s even gone as far as looking through pictures on the Wilton website with me and fell in love with the 3D doll cakes. They are beautiful! And I’m terrified of trying to make one. I just have this horrible feeling it will be a disaster for someone as inexperienced as I am.

So I needed to do a practice run this past weekend and it went something like this …

To start, I needed marshmallow fondant. While I could just as easily buy the pr-emade fondant, it just isn’t as sweet as marshmallow and not nearly as much fun. Before anything, we had to get the counter top coated with vegetable shortening to prevent sticking.

With the marshmallows melted and a bag of powdered sugar on hand, it was time for some fun. The most important thing I can stress here is to thoroughly coat your hands in the vegetable shortening … unless you like marshmallow stuck to every tiny hair on your hand.

The fun part of fondant is kneading it just like bread dough. I love working with my hands and this certainly satisfies that craving. I know my fondant is done when I can stretch it about shoulder length without it tearing.

Time to bag it and pop it in the refrigerator overnight. I just coat the ball of fondant with a thin layer of shortening, double wrap in Press n Seal and wait …

With the fondant out of the way I popped open the Wilton Wonder Mold Kit that is specially designed to create 3D doll cakes. It even comes with a pretty little doll pick. Unfortunately, she won’t work for my Cinderella cake but is just fine for practicing.

I greased, floured and poured in a yellow-fudge marbled boxed cake mix. I probably should have used another cup of cake batter, but for practice purposes there was no need to be so technical.

After 50 minutes the cake popped out beautifully and needed time to rest and cool.

When it comes to baking a decorating, the only part of the process I despise is rolling the fondant .. or cookie dough .. pretty much anything that requires being rolled. No matter how many time I practice, whatever I’m rolling always comes out uneven. I really should buy the height bands for the rolling bar.

Now when I do the real cake, I’ll cover it in buttercream first but like I said, this was just practice.

I wanted to create the illusion of a flowing dress skirt so I created tiered fondant logs and evenly spaced them around the cake.

With the fondant on, you can start to see the dress coming together.

The rest was fairly easy. I just wrapped some fondant around her body, added some puffy sleeves and that is that!

Now that I’m feeling more confident about creating this beautiful cake, I’m going to take it to the next level on Wednesday night by adding color to the fondant so she truly looks like Cinderella. As if I’m not pushing my luck as it is, she’ll be sitting on top of a base cake!

Wish me luck!

Disclosure – All products featured were bought and paid for by myself.